Tactile values & significant form

The donnee of his work was that the value of painting lay in its ability to enhance self-consciousness, by means of intense increments of experience—flashes of vision and delight. These moments were to Berenson, as to anyone fortunate enough to have them, all but indescribable. Like his passionate delight in nature, they came close to mystical experience. They disclosed the “It-ness” of which he often spoke—the irreducible, self-manifesting essence of reality.

Nevertheless Berenson felt obliged to give this oceanic pleasure of the eye, the goal of the aesthete’s quest, the trappings of a system. Hence the awkward formulations of his critical writing—“tactile values,” “ideated sensations” and the rest. The idea of “tactile values” as expounded by Berenson sounded impressive but was merely a slogan: it was to illusion what Clive Bell’s idea of “significant form” was to abstraction. It derived from a crude physiological notion of how the brain interprets space and passes that interpretation to the body. All it stood for, if analyzed, was a convincing impression of three-dimensionality. Nevertheless Berenson insisted on applying this concept as a touchstone, quite mechanically, as though it were an arguable guide to quality in art. At the same time he despised iconographical studies as mere ground work at best and, at worst, a threat to his interests: hence his loathing of Erwin Panofsky, and of the kind of work that Panofsky and his Warburg Institute colleagues pursued.

What impressed Berenson’s admirers, the court of I Tatti, was his formidable certezza. It is the very quality that now makes him seem such a period figure, so remote, and in some ways so difficult to understand. He created the role of the waspish pontiff, and took it with him; few modern art historians would want to fill it again, and probably none has the devouring energy to do so. It costs too much to maintain, and the payment is not made in money but in suppleness of thought.